The personal blog of Peter Lee a.k.a. "China Hand"... Life is a comedy to those who think, a tragedy to those who feel, and an open book to those who read. You are welcome to contact China Matters at the address chinamatters --a-- prlee.org or follow me on twitter @chinahand.

Sunday, February 22, 2015

Curtain Coming Down on Erdogan’s Excellent Uyghur Adventure?

To demonstrate that it’s possible, for me anyway, to acquire
a lot of useful information in a short period of time via Twitter, I offer for
your consideration this series of exchanges (with multipart tweets stitched
together for continuity and clarity):

The whole northern countryside of #Aleppo is crawling with
mercenaries/terrorists from Caucasus, Central Asia, and Chinese Ugyur. #Turkey

chinahand (me)

hmm. wonder if this tweeter knows stuff or just says stuff.
Interesting to explore if any of Uyghurs given haven by Turkey have gone on to
Syria with any kind of Turkish govt encouragement or knowledge.

only a few hundred Uyghurs in Turkey as I understand. If TK
subsidized & monitored them in place, PRC might think it's acceptable. But
if TK sending them to Syria to get trained/radicalized/networked, PRC will be
seriously PO'd IMO

‏tks. v/ interesting podcast. I think one area of interest
for PRC was that TK consulate replaced "lost" passports.I tend to think Turkish government militancy
policy one of "idiotic entrepreneurship" rather than carefully
managed policy i.e. set up a bunch of militant-enabling orgs w/ arms-length
deniability, let them run wild, then try to rein them in when they become too
much of a liability. Chinese media naming Turkey (& PRC MOFI spox Hong Lei
endorsing) definitely a shot across the bow. Will be interesting to see if
Turkey makes some publicly Uyghur-unfriendly gesture to please PRC.Hong Lei's statement that report
"extremely accurate" http://tinyurl.com/pob3ccv a major
tell. At same time, report was run in GT, not official govt outlet Xinhua, to
soften the blow a bit.

The knowledgeable and cordial Christoph Germann, by the way,
runs the New Great Game blog over at Sibel Edmonds’ shop and, as can be seen,
stays on top of the news from the region.I
am bookmarking NGG and look forward to visiting regularly.

To amplify on the exchange, it’s an acknowledged fact that Turkey
is hospitable to refugee Uyghurs from Xinjiang and, as a result, unhappy
Uyghurs in Xinjiang are eager to go to Turkey.

Turkey indulging its pretensions as protector of the world’s
Turkish-speaking peoples by harboring a few hundred impoverished refugees might
be acceptable to the PRC; but setting up a pipeline to encourage Uyghur
emigration and, possibly, recruiting Uyghurs to join the Syrian uprising
against Assad certainly is not.

For one thing, although the PRC has nuanced its support of
Assad, it is dead set against the strategy of foreign-supported insurrection
against the Syrian government.For
another, the PRC is undoubtedly leery of Xinjiang Uyghurs acquiring training,
radical ideology, and global jihadist connections while fighting in Syria.

So I was struck by the original poster’s complaint that
northern Syria is “crawling with mercenaries/terrorists from Caucasus, Central
Asia, and Chinese Ugyur”.

Case not yet proven, I would say.There is no documented instance of a Uyghur
fighting in one of Syria’s myriad militias as yet (one Hui Chinese showed up),
so perhaps the original tweet was more in the line of general venting about
Turkey funneling foreign fighters into Syria.Time, I guess, will tell.

However, it does not strike me as implausible on
principle.Veterans of the beleaguered
Chechen independence movement have found shelter in Turkey and employment in
Syria.

The AI Monitor link provided by Germann describes a rather sinister
situation for Turkey’s 2000 Chechen refugees where seemingly private appeals to
join jihad are apparently backed up with the decidedly government resource of
threatening deportation for the recalcitrant:

Though Turkey
tolerates the Chechen refugees, many lack residence permits and live in
destitute conditions under a constant risk of deportation, activists say. This
life in limbo led many Chechens to acquiesce to blackmail-like pressures to
join the Syrian war, according to Abrek Onlu, the slain activist’s nephew and
member of the Justice
for Medet Committee, an advocacy group created by members of Turkey’s
ethnic Caucasian community.

“Not all Chechens
volunteered to go to Syria. Some went there unwillingly. They were presented
with two options: to go to Syria or face deportation … Individuals who were
personally the subject [of such pressure] recount confidentially how certain
people would come to convey them this message,” Abrek Onlu told Al-Monitor,
reluctant to give further details.

Another committee
member claimed Islamic civic groups in Turkey were active in the
recruitment of fighters. “Some Islamic nongovernmental groups became closely
involved in dispatching fighters to Syria. … Those groups are known to have
exerted influence on Chechens living both in and outside [refugee] camps to
join the war,” Kuban Kural told an online journal.

One can imagine that one of the shadowy Turkish
organizations equally concerned with refugee welfare and with providing cannon fodder
for Turkey’s Syrian adventure might turn its intention to impoverished and
desperate Uyghurs as a human resource similar to the exiled Chechens.

Whether the Turkish government is actively and knowingly
recruiting Uyghurs to fight in Syria is a murky business cloaked by secrecy and
deniability. Smoothing the way for Uyghurs to come to Turkey is more of a matter of public policy and record.

In early February 2015, Al Jazeera sympathetically profiled Uyghur refugees residing in Turkey.In
one case history, AJ’s reporter noted the assistance provided by the Turkish embassy to Uyghur refugees:

After three months of
travel, they arrived in Malaysia, where they stayed for nine months.

He said he was
discovered traveling with a fake passport at the airport on his way out of
Malaysia, as other
Uighurs in transit have been, was arrested and thrown into prison for
three months along with his family. His wife, who had been pregnant throughout
the trek, gave birth to their seventh child in prison.

He sought assistance
from the Turkish Embassy in Malaysia, and after four months in Istanbul, he and
his family have settled in Kayseri.

An article
in Hurriyet Daily News reported that the Turkish government is not only
officially hospitable to Uyghur refugees in transit and on arrival, it is also facilitating their departure from Xinjiang:

A month ago [January
2015], 500 Uighur Turks fled the western Chinese region of Xinjiang and settled
in state housing previously used as official residences for police officers in
the city of Kayseri.

…

Some also said they
flew to Turkey with the help of Turkish government; however, they do not want
to give the details of the journey because their relatives are trying to flee
using the same methods.

A Turkish paper described the central importance of Turkish travel documents to Uyghur refugees:

For Cengiz, it took
ten days to reach Malaysia. “The shortest trip takes six days,” Ezizi says.
Illegal immigrants received fake Turkish documents in Thailand: “You have to
pay an additional $1,000 to get your passport.”

Arriving into Malaysia
safely does not mean the mission is accomplished. A Uighur has to surrender to
Malaysian security guards in order to reach the final destination: Turkey.

Firstly, an immigrant
has to pay a fine for crossing into Malaysia by an illegal route. The Malaysian
authorities then order deportation to the country where the fake passport
belongs. “This means Turkey,” Ezizi maintains. Very few tried to get another
country’s passport. Mainly, they take forged Turkish passports as “other
countries do not accept Uighur migrants.”

…

Ezizi points out that
when a Uighur arrives into Istanbul with a fake passport, the person is
released after a short judicial process: “Sometimes, that person can be sent to
jail temporarily but would be released quickly.”

It took about a month
in Bangkok to plan the next stage of their journey, the men said. They linked
up with an organized crime network from Turkey and paid about $3,500 for forged
Turkish passports, which they used to travel overland to Malaysia.

Malaysia, Mohammed
said, was "worse than Thailand." "People would say: 'Give us
your wallet, give us your jewelry or we will report you,'" he recalled.

In November after 11
months in Malaysia, they boarded a plane bound for Istanbul. There, Turkish
immigration authorities discovered the forged passports.

Shortly after the Hurriyet article—which also revealed that, in addition to the announcement that 500 Uyghurs had recently arrived in Turkey, there were
an additional 356 Uyghurs detained in Thailand who also hoped for escape to Turkey—appeared, the PRC openly cracked down or, to be
more accurate, cracked the whip on Turkey concerning the passport issue.

The PRC’s Global Times, a semi-official tabloid positioned
as China’s answer to Fox News, revealed that back in November 2014 PRC
authorities had exposed a scheme involving Turkish citizens inside the PRC
selling their passports to Uyghurs who wanted to assume Turkish identities and
escape China.When the customers were
identified, the passports were apparently mailed back to Turkey for
modification, then mailed back to the PRC for delivery.Presumably, the Turkish passport holders then
obtained replacement passports from the Turkish consular office.

Police in Shanghai's
Public Security Bureau captured the suspects in November when nine Uyghurs
attempted to sneak out of China with altered Turkish passports with the help of
two other Chinese suspects.

The investigation showed that the suspects, including a Uyghur living in Turkey
and a Turkish suspect, charged 60,000 yuan ($9,680) per person for nine
stowaways departing from Shanghai Pudong International Airport.

They also paid $2,000 each to nine Turkish people to get visas with fake
invitation letters at the Chinese Embassy in Turkey. The passports were later
sent overseas for forgery and alteration after the nine Turkish citizens
entered China with the authentic ones.

This pricy caper may have simply been an entrepreneurial
one-off.But it took place inside the
PRC, which gave Beijing the opportunity to act as the injured party.

So Global Times was unleashed. Public shaming of this sort is not unknown in
PRC foreign relations.When the
Musharraf regime was not sufficiently cooperative in tracking down militants hostile to the PRC in Pakistan’s west, PRC state media took the opportunity of Musharraf’s
state visit to the PRC to publish its most-wanted list on the front page.

Although the passport scoop was given to Global Times instead of
state media—perhaps to soften the blow a bit—PRC’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs
spokesperson Hong Lei took the highly significant step of endorsing the GT report as “extremely accurate”.

The most fraught question is of possible Turkish official or
semi-official connivance in facilitating the supply of fraudulent Turkish passports to
Uyghur refugees.

It does not seem possible that the Turkish passports are “forged”
i.e. concocted from the whole cloth by criminal gangs with scanners, printing
presses, & what-not.An interesting article on the booming fake-passport business reveals that with today’s
security measures, the foundation of a fake passport is invariably a real
passport:

More often than
not, passports are stolen from tourists and then altered with the insertion of
new pictures and additional pages.

“Criminals face
difficulties producing fake passports due to the sophisticated
anti-counterfeiting techniques, so they resort to buying real passports from
gangs of thieves, which target foreign tourists in Thailand,” General
Warawut Taweechaikarn, commander of the investigation division at the
Immigration Bureau, told The Nation Tuesday.

Thailand, through which many Uyghur refugees are funneled by
human traffickers is, indeed the world hub for passport forgery.But the forgeries always involve modification
of a genuine passport, stolen from a tourist or bought from a down-at-the-heels
backpacker.And, as the Global Times
article indicates, the modifications to the passports took place in Turkey, not
Thailand, for a reason that will become apparent.

That’s because Turkish passports have been biometric since
2010, an EU requirement.Daily Hurriyetreported at the time:

The government
subsequently decided to print the new passports in the Darphane, or state mint.
The French digital-security company Gemalto will provide the chips for the
passports.

Yes, that Gemalto, the “got hacked to pieces by the NSA and
GCHQ” Gemalto.

A biometric passport,
also known as an e-passport or ePassport, is a combined paper and electronic
passport that uses biometrics to authenticate the identity of travelers. It
uses contactless smart card technology, including a microprocessor chip
(computer chip) and antenna (for both power to the chip and communication)
embedded in the front or back cover, or center page, of the passport.

The chip inside the
passport contains information about the holder's face – such as the distances between
eyes, nose, mouth and ears. These details are taken from the passport
photograph that you supply. They can then be used to identify the
passport-holder. The chip also holds the information that is printed on the
personal details page of your passport.

According to the EU, “a few” non-biometric Turkish passports still exist in the wild but will be
completely phased out on November 15, 2015. The next iteration of the biometric passport
will, in addition to facial features, include a digital record of the holder’s
fingerprints.

So it looks like the Turkish passports are not only being
forged using legit Turkish passports as a foundation; I consider it unlikely
that forgeries of the more recent biometric passports are knocked out without
some official or unofficial help from Turkish intelligence agencies.

In the case of the 155 Uyghurs in Malaysia, it is worth pondering that
they were not apprehended because their passports were forged. They
were rounded up on a tip, perhaps from an aggrieved neighbor (the 155
people were crammed into two apartment units in Kuala Lumpur) and the
best the Malaysian authorities could say when confronted with the
spectacle of 155 Uyghurs brandishing Turkish passports was that they
"suspected" the passports were fake.

So I wonder when, if ever, the forged nature
of these passports is actually detected: at the Malaysian border?At immigration in Turkey, only because they
show up on a watch list provided by Turkish intelligence, which maybe prepared the faked passports in the first place?

As to motivation for possible Turkish involvement in the
Uyghur refugee/passport escapade, I can only speculate.

Beyond Erdogan’s desire to position Turkey as motherland of
the Turkic-speaking race (the Turkic tribes that fled before the warriors of
the Mongolian steppes and in their turn ravaged Europe up to the gates of
Vienna before settling in Istanbul actually originated near if not in northern
Xinjiang), it is possible that Turkey hopes to establish itself as an important
and necessary interlocutor with the PRC on the issue of the Uyghurs and thereby
reduce the asymmetry in its relations with the economically overbearing Asian
superpower, furthermore a superpower which is a fearsome competitor to Turkey in the battle for influence in Central Asia's stans.

In 2009, Erdogan characterized the PRC presence in Xinjiang as “a kind of genocide” and threatened to issue a
visa to Rebiya Kadeer, head of the World Uygur Congress émigré group.

Given Turkey’s rather reckless recent history in using
militants to increase its regional leverage, it is not unreasonable to
speculate that Erdogan thought that he could gain China’s attention if not its
gratitude by fostering a significant Uyghur diaspora inside Turkey and using
control over this presence and its inclination to support activism and
resistance inside Xinjiang as an asset in his dealings with the PRC.

This tendency may have climaxed in November 2014, when Turkey’s Foreign Minister publicly called for the Uyghurs
detained in Thailand to be sent to Turkey.

However, I suspect that the curtain is coming down on Erdogan’s
excellent Uyghur adventure.

For the PRC government, which sees a possible replay of Chechnya in Xinjiang (and therefore ignores the human rights & religious freedom whinging from
the West concerning the harshness of its rule), denying Uyghurs a foreign
refuge is the highest priority.If and
when the PRC’s vaunted “noninterference in the internal affairs of other
nations” policy goes by the wayside, it will probably involve some kind of Uyghur-related
cross-border military operation against some militant haven that Afghanistan or
Pakistan are unwilling or unable to deal with.

Job one for the PRC is to pressure its neighbors to crack
down both on potential havens and the Uyghurs who might occupy them.

In 2009, Cambodia repatriated 20 Uyghurs and, in an apparent quid pro
quo, received a massive aid deal from the PRC.

And Afghanistan, seeking the PRC’s good offices in
negotiating the future role of the Taliban and PRC’s support for
reconstruction, publicly revealed last week that it had arrested and repatriated 15 Uyghurs to the PRC.

As for Turkey, as noted above the PRC made representations
in the strongest public terms in January 2015 that it will not tolerate Turkey
serving as a haven for Uyghur refugees, especially if it involves active
collusion and jiggery-pokery in the matter of forged Turkish passports.

Turkey publicly knuckled under on the issue, sending its
National Police Chief Mehmet Celalettin Lekesiz to Beijing in early February
2015.This occasioned the usual crass vauntingby Global Times, and also the reported
call by his host, Minister of Public Security Guo Shengkun, that both sides
enhance public cooperation on "combating organized human smuggling”.

‘Nuff said.

As to the hundreds of Uyghurs detained in Thailand and
offered the possibility of succor by Turkey, they appear to be victims of a)
the new Thai junta’s pro-PRC tilt and b) Turkey sidling away from its November
2014 declaration of concern.RFA reported in late January 2015 that one campful of Uyghurs is on hunger strike to
protest its miserable sojourn in detentive limbo and Turkish support doesn’t
seem to be in the offing:

The detainees in the
Hat Yai facility are among the roughly 300 Uyghur refugees who fled to Thailand
10 months ago, some of whom maintain they are Turkish citizens in an apparent
effort to win support from the government of Turkey.

Thai authorities and international media, however, say they are Uyghur Muslims
from Xinjiang where the minority group complains of ethnic discrimination by
Chinese authorities.

The detainee said a prison officer at Hat Yai told them: “If all of you really
are Turkish citizens and the Turkish government sends us an official letter to
testify you are Turkish citizens, we will release you and let you all go to
Turkey as soon as possible.”

In contrast to its previous expressions of enthusiasm, Turkey now seems
uninterested in handling this hot potato.

Turkey also seems to be taking a leaf from the Indian
playbook and keeping its public-sector support for the Uyghur refugees to a
minimum of residency permits and free housing (as India keeps an arms-length
relationship with the Tibetan exile community centered on Dharmasala).Many of the Uyghur refugees interviewed by
the international media expressed a general dissatisfaction with the niggardly
nature of Turkish government support, and it looks like private parties, the
Uyghur diaspora, NGOs, and the occasional jihadist recruiter will have to fill
in the gaps.

It will be interesting to see if hundreds of Uyghur refugees
continue to turn up in Turkey thanks to forged Turkish passports.I tend to doubt it.

11 comments:

Source The independent (http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/middle-east/isis-in-syria-the-story-of-the-martyred-soldiers-who-fought-to-the-last-bullet-to-avoid-the-fate-of-captured-comrades-beheaded-by-militants-9854693.html), frontline between loyalists and IS 20 miles south of Qamishli

The military claims that in one operation four months ago, they captured 18 villages from Isis in 24 hours. But Isis can still penetrate these defences. A few hours before I arrived in Qamishli, a suicide bomber blew himself up outside a local Kurdish militia office, killing five of their fighters.

Nor did the Syrian colonel and general travelling with me take their enemies lightly. Repeatedly, the general told his men we were entering a “silence zone” in which no soldiers were permitted to use radios. He acknowledged that Isis must listen in, just as the Syrians can hear Isis communications.

“We often don’t understand them because they are foreigners speaking their own language,” the general said. When I asked him which language he heard most frequently, he replied. “Well, it’s very strange, but we think many of them are speaking in a language which is Chinese.” He was not joking.

And what, I asked, about those famous Isis black-and-white flags which we have all seen on the television pictures from the Kurdish town of Kobani – or Ain al-Arab in Arabic – far to the west of us? “Simple,” the general said. “Whenever they put a flag up, even for five minutes, I call in artillery fire and blow it to bits. They haven’t tried to raise a flag here for weeks.”

Well China does matter to me. Uyghurs are Chinese national. Only they need a good direction and a good Muslim Governor in Xinjiang Province. I can assure that if Beijing give them right of religious activities, it could become the motive force to them to be patriotic to People Republic of China. If any Uyghur brother reading it, remember Prophet Muhammad S.A.W command to be patriotic to your country. World is changing faster, even some Muslim governing countries are worst in matter of Islam and shariah. So you have to make your home Xinjiang China, United and peaceful. So at least Uyghurs can become most powerful Muslims on Earth.

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